Friday, July 28, 2006

Unbanned from Digg

After two emails to Digg's abuse email address, and an intervention by Leo Laporte (thanks Leo!) direct to Kevin Rose, my Digg account has been unbanned.

Here's the official word I got from Digg:

Your account has been unbanned. Your account was banned for violating digg Terms Of Use, submitting the exact same story in less then 3 minutes time, that's what spammers usually do on digg. As a consequence, we banned your account. Your account was NOT banned for linking to reddit.com or for submitting a joke.

-The Digg Watch Team.

So I'm letting this go now. They say they were OK with the joke, and just thought (erroneously) that I was spamming. I never believed that it was because of some reddit/digg rivalry.

So, it's over.

But a note to Digg: please alter the way Bury Story works so that it's obvious when a story has been buried, that the reason it was buried is clear, and that the list of people who buried the story is given (just like you do for who dugg a story). Just doing that one thing would end a lot of confusion.

Update on August 1, 2006: I just came across a blog entry that makes some untrue claims about me concerning this:

1. The problem was, then he submitted the story multiple times. Actually, I submitted the same story twice, not multiple times and as I've explained this was because I screwed up the URL on the Reddit side and had to start again. You can check for yourself how many times I submitted the story my looking at my Digg account submission history.

You can also see that the two stories have different URLs, and that one story has just one digg. That's partly because I buried that story myself once I realized I had screwed up.

2. and then created multiple fake accounts and dugg his own stories. Once I discovered that my account was banned I did two things: I emailed [email protected] asking why and I created a new account for myself. So multiple here is 1, and I only did that because Digg killed my regular account.

9 Comments:

This really sounds more like a case of trying to clean up massive bad press and less about doing the right thing. I, for one, have given up on Digg. This isn't the first time they've banned accounts or censored posts and I doubt it will be the last.

so you trash their reputation and then say that you're letting them go? you DID double post on both reddit and digg... seems quite a logical explanation on their part, meanwhile you go and get everyone up in arms without even trying to find out why you were banned. there was even a story on the register about it. i think you should be doing some apologising, not saying that in this instance you'll "let it go".

1. I don't know if Digg censors its front page. I have no way of telling. The way the 'Bury Story' functions right now it's impossible to tell if a story has been buried. Digg really should add a 'This story is buried' flag and give the list of people who buried it (just like they give the list of people who digg a story).

2. I submitted the story twice because I made a mistake typing one of the URLs. When I was at Reddit I wrote Recursion as Recurison in the Digg URL which meant the recursion would not work. Hence I downvoted my bad story on Reddit, Buried my story on Digg and started again.

3. I did double post on Digg and Reddit, and I got banned from Digg for that. The fact that people in the Reddit community took my banning as a conspiracy theory about Digg censoring Reddit stories is not my doing.

Secondly, once I was banned I immediately emailed Digg and asked them why. They failed to reply to two emails and I only got a reply once Leo Laporte had directly emailed Kevin Rose on my behalf.

So, I'm glad that this is over because Digg's team totally overreacted to two stories with different URLs but the same title, and they failed to respond to my emails.

Heh.. Nice to have you back.. Now do remember though that digg might be naughty, but it ain't that bad..For example, my digg submissions which was dugg to the frontpage describing the whole situation fuelled the good bidding as well (AHEM! AHEM, Everyone wants to take credit these days, so why not me)

Anyway, after all these..people might think twice before making a joke about digg...which is kinda not what I wanted digg to become though

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